Business abandons GOP for Democrats

Lag, lag, lag. That’s all you hear these days regarding Republican fundraising compared with the Democrats’.

Now we can add a new word: abandoned.

Story Continued Below

The business community that celebrated the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994 by spending millions to prop it up for more than a decade is in full retreat.

All 10 of the top-giving industries tracked by the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan money and politics watchdog group, are now donating more cash to Democrats than Republicans. A year ago, Republicans had the edge in six of the 10 sectors.

Financial powerhouse Goldman Sachs has sent 71 percent of its cash this year to Democrats while JPMorgan delivered 68 percent of its checks to the new majority.

Citigroup Inc. followed close behind, with 63 percent of its cash deposited in the accounts of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her colleagues. Even the big drug companies are trying to warm up to their adversaries; that sector is giving at a rate of 50-50.

Only the old allies of President Bush and Vice President Cheney in the oil and gas sector are holding firm, giving 72 percent of their donations to Republicans and 28 percent to Democrats. Of course, those numbers could change after the Democrats unveil a global warming bill and the industry’s lobbyists seek to tweak the final language.

An obvious engine behind the shifting fortunes of the parties is the Democratic takeover of Congress. Businesses that ignored minority members for years are now trying to build relationships with the new power players.

These new friendships could quickly turn prickly as Democrats zero in on new funding sources for their domestic agenda by closing tax loopholes and raising other taxes that impact the business community.

But there’s more at work here. In many ways, Republicans have nobody but themselves to blame for turning the mutually beneficial and philosophically aligned relationship between corporations and GOP caucuses into little more than a transactional one, easily discarded at first evidence of a market disruption.

Republican leaders threatened a freeze-out of business lobbyists who dared hire a Democrat or ignored the names on the leadership’s private hiring tip sheet.

Pay-to-play became the insider mantra during the Republican reign. But “extortion” was how many CEOs described the annual shakedowns by committee chairmen with jurisdiction over their industries.

No group expressed greater relief — privately and publicly — than the business community when the 2002 McCain-Feingold law banning unlimited corporate donations to politicians became law.

Even the GOP’s agenda seems to have curled cruelly back on their erstwhile allies.

Sure, President Bush’s big tax cuts and easing of regulatory oversight were roundly applauded. But then there was the Sarbanes-Oxley law, a cumbersome set of new rules imposed on corporations after a spate of their own scandals.